Are these numbers all wet? Statements about relative humidity do not jive with the record (Updated 2/16/2017).

On September 28, 2015 NASA announced that it found abundant evidence of running water on Mars. Later, in November, 2016 NASA announced that they had found a frozen sea at Utopia Planitia on Mars that has about as much water as is in Lake Superior on Eath. Both facts increase the chance that NASA's often stated low pressures on Mars are wrong. Our full article about Running Water in Mars is athttp://davidaroffman.com/photo2_13.html. A quick look at the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) where the running water is found is shown below on an animated GIF time-lapse animation of Palikir Crater. The streaks extend and darken during warmer months on Mars, then gradually fade as temperatures cool. Obviously there must be a significant amount of water vapor to measure at the thousands of stream seen so far, but not one single daily report for MSL weather issued by the REMS Team between August 22, 2012 and February 14, 2017 included any figure for relative humidity. GIF Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/University of Arizona.

The Curiosity rover team reported the new results today (April 8) at the 2013 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, where scientists also provided other updates about the rover's recent discoveries.

For example, Curiosity's onboard weather station, known as REMS (for Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) has shown that humidity varies from place to place along the robot's route inside Mars' huge Gale Crater. REMS' observations are the first systematic measurements of humidity on the Martian surface, researchers said.

As mentioned above, No daily reports for MSL up through at least April 6, 2016 included any data for relative humidity. As is seen with the examples below, all reports simply indicated --% for relative humidity or "Value not available." Until it ceased reporting Ashima Research chose to reproduce none of the relative humidity figures (really, lack thereof) on any of its reports taken from the REMS Team. HOWEVER, on April 13, 2015 JPL published an article entitled NASA Mars Rover's Weather Data Bolster Case For Brine. This article states, Curiosity is the first mission to measure relative humidity in the Martian atmosphere close to the surface and ground temperature through all times of day and all seasons of the Martian year. Relative humidity depends on the temperature of the air, as well as the amount of water vapor in it. Curiosity's measurements of relative humidity range from about five percent on summer afternoons to 100 percent on autumn and winter nights."

Figure 1 above: Daily weather reports from REMS have not included relative humidity.

On June 27, 2013 the information below appeared on the REMS Team website.The graph below was also on the site, although we have cleaned up the fonts /text for clarification purposes. The relative humidity figures offered do not match any of the daily weather reports by the REMS Team, which continues to list all RH data as --%.

4.08.2013 Humidity in Gale Crater: Scant and Variable. This graphic tracks the maximum relative humidity and the temperature at which that maximum occurred each Martian day, or sol, for about one-fourth of a Martian year, as measured by the Remote Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. These are the first systematic measurements of humidity on Mars. The data are graphed by sol number (starting with Curiosity's landing day as Sol 0), for a period from mid-August 2012 to mid-February 2013, corresponding to late winter through late spring in Mars' southern hemisphere. Four vertical lines on the graph mark progress points of the rover's traverse. While air temperature is not strongly tied to the rover's location, REMS has measured significantly different relative humidity in the different terrain units where the rover has been. All of the sites along the rover's traverse are extremely dry compared with Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CAB(CSIC-INTA)/FMI/Ashima Research.

FIRST COMMENT BY THE MARS CORRECT TEAM: As we illustrate on Figure 4, when the relative humidities and sol numbers on Figure 3 are matched with actual position, as published by JPL, it can be seen that all variation in relative humidity, from about 60% down to less than 10% actually only occurs over a distance of about 400 meters.

Figure 3 below adapted from the REMS Team: On June 27, 2013 REMS published this chart, but it continued to leave relative humidity reported only as --% on all its daily MSL weather reports. As of April 6, 2016 the relative humidity is still left off the daily charts.

Figure 4: The REMS Team alleges large changes in relative humidity over small distances and with fairly constant temperatures. The relative humidity data shown on Figures 3 and 4 are not matched by their daily reports, as we noted in conjunction with Figure 1

Figure 5: REMS maximum and minimum temperatures.

WATER FOUND JUST UNDER THE MARTIAN SURFACE MAY AFFECT RELATIVE HUMIDITY AT THE SURFACE. On September 26, 2013, JPL announced that the MSL Rover Curiosty had found that Martian soil at Gale Crater was 2% water, meaning that there are 2 pints of water in every cubic foot of soil. The full article is below. Any comments by FoxNews.Com will be shown in blue bold fonts with our questions in red bold fonts.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Curiosity rover is revealing a great deal about Mars, from long-ago processes in its interior to the current interaction between the Martian surface and atmosphere.

Examination of loose rocks, sand and dust has provided new understanding of the local and global processes on Mars. Analysis of observations and measurements by the rover's science instruments during the first four months after the August 2012 landing are detailed in five reports in the Sept. 27 edition of the journal Science.

A key finding is that water molecules are bound to fine-grained soil particles, accounting for about 2 percent of the particles' weight at Gale Crater where Curiosity landed. This result has global implications, because these materials are likely distributed around the Red Planet.

On this point FoxNews.Com had the following coverage:

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints of water out of every cubic foot of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

"For me, that was a big 'wow' moment," Leshin told SPACE.com. "I was really happy when we saw that there's easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it's probably true anywhere you go on Mars." [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]

Dr. Leshon: You will continue to have wow moments until you realize Mars has higher pressure than NASA advertises. If it really had such low pressure as they say, the water near the surface should evaporate out of the top soil. By the way, note that the sky color is blue, not the butterscotch or red color that NASA insisted on ever since they altered the color of the sky as seen by Viking 1.

The link above is from Space. Com. The article there are states that, "SAM also determined that the soil water is rich in deuterium, a "heavy" isotope of hydrogen that contains one neutron and one proton (as opposed to "normal" hydrogen atoms, which have no neutrons). The water in Mars' thin air sports a similar deuterium ratio, Leshin said. "That tells us that the dirt is acting like a bit of a sponge and absorbing water from the atmosphere," she said. The question here again is how she can be sure about which happened first. Is Mars really absorbing water from an atmosphere that is supposed to be almost a vacuum, or is the atmosphere filled with deuterium rich water that has not evaporated.

Curiosity also has completed the first comprehensive mineralogical analysis on another planet using a standard laboratory method for identifying minerals on Earth. The findings about both crystalline and non-crystalline components in soil provide clues to the planet's volcanic history.

Information about the evolution of the Martian crust and deeper regions within the planet comes from Curiosity's mineralogical analysis of a football-size igneous rock called "Jake M." Igneous rocks form by cooling molten material that originated well beneath the crust. The chemical compositions of the rocks can be used to infer the thermal, pressure and chemical conditions under which they crystallized.

"No other Martian rock is so similar to terrestrial igneous rocks," said Edward Stolper of the California Institute of Technology, lead author of a report about this analysis. "This is surprising because previously studied igneous rocks from Mars differ substantially from terrestrial rocks and from Jake M."

The other four reports include analysis of the composition and formation process of a windblown drift of sand and dust, by David Blake of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and co-authors.

Curiosity examined this drift, called Rocknest, with five instruments, preforming an onboard laboratory analysis of samples scooped up from the Martian surface. The drift has a complex history and includes sand particles with local origins, as well as finer particles that sample windblown Martian dust distributed regionally or even globally.

The rover is equipped with a laser instrument to determine material compositions from some distance away. This instrument found that the fine-particle component in the Rocknest drift matches the composition of windblown dust and contains water molecules. The rover tested 139 soil targets at Rocknest and elsewhere during the mission's first three months and detected hydrogen -- which scientists interpret as water -- every time the laser hit fine-particle material.

"The fine-grain component of the soil has a similar composition to the dust distributed all around Mars, and now we know more about its hydration and composition than ever before," said Pierre-Yves Meslin of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France, lead author of a report about the laser instrument results.

A laboratory inside Curiosity used X-rays to determine the composition of Rocknest samples. This technique, discovered in 1912, is a laboratory standard for mineral identification on Earth. The equipment was miniaturized to fit on the spacecraft that carried Curiosity to Mars, and this has yielded spinoff benefits for similar portable devices used on Earth. David Bish of Indiana University in Bloomington co-authored a report about how this technique was used and its results at Rocknest.

X-ray analysis not only identified 10 distinct minerals, but also found an unexpectedly large portion of the Rocknest composition is amorphous ingredients, rather than crystalline minerals. Amorphous materials, similar to glassy substances, are a component of some volcanic deposits on Earth.

Another laboratory instrument identified chemicals and isotopes in gases released by heating the Rocknest soil in a tiny oven. Isotopes are variants of the same element with different atomic weights. These tests found water makes up about 2 percent of the soil, and the water molecules are bound to the amorphous materials in the soil.

"The ratio of hydrogen isotopes in water released from baked samples of Rocknest soil indicates the water molecules attached to soil particles come from interaction with the modern atmosphere," said Laurie Leshin of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., lead author of a report about analysis with the baking instrument.

Baking and analyzing the Rocknest sample also revealed a compound with chlorine and oxygen, likely chlorate or perchlorate, which previously was known to exist on Mars only at one high-latitude site. This finding at Curiosity's equatorial site suggests more global distribution.

Data obtained from Curiosity since the first four months of the rover's mission on Mars are still being analyzed. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission draws upon international collaboration, including key instrument contributions from Canada, Spain, Russia and France.